Resort beaches rely on pumping sand

Critics says beach renourishment is a waste, but tourism dollars are at stake

Aug. 21, 2012

In the last 1 ½ years, $35 million was spent renourishing the resort beaches of Rehoboth, Dewey, Lewes and Bethany. / News Journal file

About the journalists

» Jeff Montgomery has worked for The News Journal since 1985 and currently focuses on environmental issues and special projects. » Molly Murray has covered government and conservation for The News Journal for 32 years. » Dan Garrow has done graphics at The News Journal for 29 years. » Reporters from other Gannett newspapers contributed to this series: Brian Shane of the Worcester County (Md.) Times, Jeremy Cox and Sam Spiegelman of the (Salisbury, Md.) Daily Times, Carol Vaughn of the Eastern Shore News and Laren Hughes of the Delaware Coast Press.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

PART 1: Seas are rising fast in the Mid-Atlantic, forcing discussion about where to retreat, where to make a stand.

PART 2: Farmers, homeowners and businesses worry about the loss of property as brine water pushes further inland.

PART 3: The price, protection and value of artificially maintaining beaches in commercially vibrant areas – contrasted by the dwindling dunes at beaches left natural.

More

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Big storms routinely suck sand away from beaches along mid-Atlantic coasts, and taxpayers regularly pay for sand to be scooped up off the ocean floor and pumped right back.

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says the $100 million or more Congress spends annually to “renourish” beaches nationwide is wasteful – a losing fight against rising tides that encourages building in vulnerable areas and benefits mostly the wealthy.

Coastal community leaders see a much different picture. Money spent on the dredges that pump sand onto the shores, and the earthmovers that smooth out the material, they say, are good investments for taxpayers nationwide – and for Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia in particular.

And as scientists declare with increasing certainty that the world’s climate is changing and seas are rising, beach leaders along the Mid-Atlantic argue that resort shorelines must be armored against a future with more-extreme weather and tides that push higher and deeper into developed areas.

The state of Maryland has invested millions “into beach replenishment and has made it a priority primarily because of the economic impact of tourism in Ocean City,” says Melanie A. Pursel, executive director of the Greater Ocean City Chamber of Commerce.

The economic impact of beaches fortified with fresh sand spills into service industries and real estate, attracting both entrepreneurs and retirees searching for a laid-back lifestyle near the shore. Should resort beaches ever show signs of serious decline, Everhart adds, “It would be hard to list the things that it wouldn’t touch.”

A recent University of Delaware Sea Grant report, funded by the federal government, concluded that coastal communities between Lewes and Fenwick Island sustain 59,000 jobs and contribute $6.9 billion annually to Delaware’s economy.

If beaches along mid-Atlantic coasts had not been replenished since the 1960s, shorelines “would be significantly further inland than they are today,” says Tony Pratt, Delaware’s shoreline and waterway manager.

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Boardwalks, hotels, shops and homes would not stand in the permanent footprints they’ve enjoyed for decades.

No renourishment, no beach – at least not the kind of beach society has grown accustomed to, where French fry and salt water taffy stands are almost as common as big umbrellas that dot the manicured sand.

Mary C. Stevens, a 30-year resident of Fenwick Island who has a job with the city of Ocean City, says beach renourishment “works, and it’s the only thing that works. I’ve seen them try to use concrete blocks or tires that were supposed to fill up with sand and stabilize the beach, and that was pretty stupid.”

Because resort-area tax receipts prop up other counties on the Delmarva Peninsula with less commerce, Stevens adds, “I can’t imagine them letting the beach go under.”

Forgotten beach

If you want to see what a beach – Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City or Cape May, N.J., for example –might look like without “renourishment,” Pratt says, take a trip along Delaware Bay to Big Stone Beach, north and east of Milford.

Big Stone Beach was last renourished in 1962, following a devastating nor’easter that pummeled the mid-Atlantic with 60 hours of wind, rain and flooding. From North Carolina to Long Island Sound in New York, 40 people died, 1,200 were injured and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Following the March storm, 26,000 cubic yards of sand was brought to Big Stone by truck and spread across the face of the beach.

There’s little of that protective sand left today. At high tide on the private beach, water laps at pilings under about half of 15 remaining homes. The rest are snuggled behind a man-made dune, which was rebuilt after being destroyed by storms.

Brian Day, who has lived at Big Stone Beach for three decades in a house now owned by his son and daughter-in-law, sees little long-term hope for the community without aggressive state action.

“I don’t think the state cares about it and wouldn’t [help] unless it was turned over to the state,” says Day.

Big Stone Beach sits on a ribbon of sand between the bay and a marsh, and constant flooding from the marsh has made things worse. The private road back to Del. 1 is often under water and impassable during storms.

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Day’s home already has been moved back and raised onto pilings once, but it’s still threatened. He’s been stranded for days after big storms blow by.

“The tides have gotten higher over the years,” explains Day.

Big Stone resident Jenny Wright says the raw power and beauty of the bay opened up to her last year after the house in front of her home was damaged during Hurricane Irene and had to be torn down.

“Every time there is a storm, these dunes completely erode,” says Wright, who has lived at Big Stone Beach for 10 years.

She wishes state officials would allow homeowners to build an armored dune – rock underneath and sand on top – to lend more protection, but knows it won’t happen. She believes state officials would be happy if Big Stone’s 15 homeowners “just got out.”

Like other Delawareans who live along the coast, she was caught off guard by the 2008 Mother’s Day nor’easter. Wright expected wind and rain but was astonished that the anemometer outside clocked winds at 90 miles per hour before being blown away. She had to be rescued from the rising water.

Economic benefit

In the age of climate change and rising seas, constantly renewing sand lost during storms makes a big difference to beaches.

The shoreline of a natural beach constantly changes with the tides.

A renourished beach maintains an artificial resemblance of what the shore looked like before boardwalks and buildings were established, giving it a sense of normalcy in a changing environment.

In July, Gov. Jack Markell and Delaware’s congressional delegation announced that the 18-month renourishment project along 6.6 miles of municipal resort beach had been completed, at a cost of $35 million.

Most of the money came from federal coffers, and paid for repairs to erosion by the November 2009 storm dubbed Nor’Ida. Some 3.5 million cubic yards of sand were poured across resort beaches –enough to fill Lincoln Financial Field, where the Philadelphia Eagles play, three times.

Critics warn that climate change will shorten the benefits of pumping sand onto beaches. Proponents push back, contending that the cost-benefit studies used to justify beach “nourishment” spending will find increasing benefits as more valuable lands and buildings are deemed to be in harm’s way.

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“In a couple of projects that I have seen from other districts around the country, when they looked at it and went through the low- medium- and high-[risk] scenarios of future sea-level rise, they actually found the benefits of protecting infrastructure going up faster than the cost,” says Jeffrey A. Gebert, an Army Corps of Engineers manager in the agency’s Philadelphia district office.

Sea-level rise was not directly factored into the most recent renourishment projects of Rehoboth, Dewey, Bethany and South Bethany. All were planned prior to the corps’ ruling in 2009 that, moving forward, engineers “must” factor half-meter, 1 meter and 1.5 meter sea-level increase scenarios into beach projects.

But whatever rules are promulgated, it’s clear that states will defend resort beaches.

“Are we going to let Rehoboth Beach go under water?” asks Sarah Cooksey, coastal management program director for Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. “I doubt it. There are some things that are really clear.”

On a typical peak summer day, Ocean City’s population swells to an average 326,000 – nearly 46 times its year-round population of about 7,100. The 9,500 hotel and motel rooms and the 25,000 condominium units are filled with tourists, and the three-mile boardwalk and 200 restaurants are loaded with people.

They come because the beach is well maintained, Pursell says, because sand lost to storms is replaced through renourishment.

“We continue to lobby for this type of funding,” Pursell says. “We have massive dunes that are protected areas from 27th Street north which do a wonderful job preserving the beach during storms.”

Former Maryland Congressman Wayne T. Gilchrest, a moderate Republican who represented the Eastern Shore from 1990-2008, knows well the need to protect beach resorts, and in fact worked to secure funding for beach renourishment.

But Gilchrest also believes the citizenry has an obligation to understand climate change, and to approach the issue from a point of view free of politics and emotion.

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“The biggest problem we have, whether it’s beach replenishment, climate change, drought, storms or rain, is that the vast majority of people are, quite frankly, ignorant when it comes to what they need to know, what they need to pass along to their children and grandchildren so they’re not duped by ideology or pseudo-science or fake science,” says Gilchrest.

“You replenish a beach and say it’s going to last 5 or 10 years, and then a storm comes up and they say the storm was unexpected? That’s ludicrous,” Gilchrest says. “The outlook is not going to get any better.”

Insurance issues

Scientists around the globe have concluded that massive human releases of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses have accelerated a warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Researchers have said that warming has led to changes in ocean surface temperature and could set off dramatic shifts in climate, bringing more-intense storms, longer periods of drought and longer heat waves that could eventually create hardships and environmental and ecosystem changes around the world.

And heat-related expansion of the ocean and the melting of huge ice sheets in places like Antarctica and Greenland have accelerated gradual, global sea-level rise. Along the mid-Atlantic, scientists have concluded that the process could push tides up by 1.6 feet or more by 2050 and 3.3 feet or more by 2100, with a potential that the process would continue for centuries.

The insurance industry is taking notice.

Some states, including Florida and Massachusetts, have reported major insurance problems for coastal property owners. Solutions have included publicly organized, and in some cases taxpayer-backed, insurance pools or last-resort programs that ease homeowner burdens, while also raising costs while doing little to reduce risks already in place.

In April, Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic reported that insurers in significant numbers are boosting rates for policies in areas vulnerable to coastal storm damage, or pulling out altogether. Some companies, including Allianz and State Farm, have publicly declared climate change a major concern, the report said, and Lloyd’s of London ranked it the company’s top issue back in 2007, well before most states began to react.

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Cancellations and rate hikes have been “extremely controversial” and a hardship for property owners and communities, the Harvard study notes, but they also “can be seen as a crude way of promoting climate change adaptation – in that they discourage construction in areas that are likely to be increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change.”

“The last few years a number of companies have become more-restrictive in the areas they write,” Bunting says. “Some of the major companies have moved away from the beach, but the market is still there.”

Bunting, who recalled watching laborious beach rebuilding efforts while working as a lifeguard after a hellish nor’easter reshaped Delaware’s coast in 1962, says the state must protect and preserve its resort shorelines.

“I think there’s such an economic benefit,” Bunting says. “You can spend $1 and get $100 in return.”

“It’s still a great economy. All of the property east of U.S. 113 is really based on the benchmark of what the properties are bringing at the beach.”

Tougher choices are ahead along Delaware Bay, Bunting says, where smaller communities may need multi-million dollar beach commitments from the state in coming years, in some cases to preserve a relatively small number of homes.

“I think it’s going to be a difficult sell” in the General Assembly, Bunting says. “The economics are not comparable with Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach. You have to be pragmatic: Where is the money going to come from, for an area that in some places has slowly deteriorated?”

Federal worries

White House budget writers have for more than a decade tried to stop funds from being used to widen beaches, and headlines about wasteful congressional budget earmarks – including the “Road to nowhere” in Alaska – have made that funding stream more difficult.

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Still, the scale and speed of coastal changes have increased the alarm in some quarters, says Howard Marlowe, the leading congressional lobbyist called upon to represent state and local governments in search of funding for beach renourishment.

“Whether you believe in climate change or not, what you have to do is face the fact that, right now, sea-level is rising,” said Marlowe, dubbed the Sand-a Claus of beaches by USA Today.

Congress has continued to boost administration proposals for beach renourishment even after members banned earmarks, Marlowe notes. And the $100 million or so America allocates each year at the federal level pales in comparison to Europe’s spending on beach nourishment – now in the annual range of 2 billion to 3 billion Euros.

Yet Marlowe notes there is a twist of irony in America’s outlay of funds to replenish beaches: Federal agencies are barred from establishing zoning controls that could curb state and local land use decisions that make coastal zones more vulnerable, and some communities – including North Carolina’s Outer Banks – are calling for even more federal help, arguing that sea-level rise risks were not clear when development occurred.

“We have communities where people have just built in the wrong place,” Marlowe said.

North Carolina lawmakers recently approved a plan banning consideration of accelerated sea-level rise when making development decisions on the coast. And federal funds are often granted to states where poor planning occurred.

“There is an irony in the federal program,” Marlowe explains. “The higher you go, the denser you build, the closer you build to the ocean, the more your [area] benefits” from beach replenishment projects. “That is totally wrong. It was never intended to be that way.”

Longtime connections

Barbara Quillen Dougherty has been coming to Dewey Beach since she was 3 months old, and remembers stories told from the 1930s when cows from the Dodd farm – what is now the Seabreeze development – were led out to graze on beach grass.

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But by the 1950s, when Dougherty was a teenager, rustic Dewey had a beach rental service for umbrellas and a man sold Nehi sodas from a refrigerator he’d turned on its side off of Reed Street. Her father would go door-to-door raising money to pay for lifeguards. But on rainy days, the teenagers would gather round the canvas beach umbrellas and play card games for a nickel a hand.

It was all about the beach, says Dougherty, who says one of her most poignant memories was the March nor’easter of 1962.

“It was like a giant had stepped on the houses.” The storm struck a few weeks before her 21st birthday, Dougherty says, and the popular nightclub the Pink Pony was “washed into the sea.”

The beach recovered beautifully, Dougherty says, but she sees the value in pumping sand.

Valiante says flooding has become a regular problem at the home his family purchased in 1978 along Atlantic Street in Fenwick Island. He made Fenwick his permanent home in 1996.

“I do believe the ocean is rising. Look at the melting of the ice in Greenland,” Valiante says. “It’s like any problem. Even though it might be 50 or 60 or 100 years from now, the time to address it is now, not when the waves come crashing in.”

“We’re only a block from the beach,” Valiante says. “If they don’t keep replenishing it, in about 10 years we’re going to be on the oceanfront.”

Down the shore at Ocean City, $88 million has been spent on beach renourishment since the ’62 nor’easter, and resident Nancy Howard feels it was the right thing to do.

In 1985, long before climate change had prompted mainstream predictions of rising sea levels, University of Maryland and federal Environmental Protection Agency scientists warned that Ocean City’s 10-mile long beach would suffer serious erosion without sand being artificially pumped onto the shore. They estimated it would take 5 to 10 million cubic yards of sand to hold the beach at 1985 levels.

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“Our beach was in bad shape,” recalls Howard, a former city councilwoman, who worked with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to get easements for the Ocean City beach-fill project. “We had buildings whose foundations were exposed. We had to do something.”

Walls of concrete built on beaches afford buildings some short-term protection, but eventually excaberate erosion. Wave action stirs up the bottom and carries off sand, scouring the wall at its base.

But Howard notes that since the massive infusions of sand, buildings on Ocean City’s shore have since endured serious nor’easters and come out OK – because the beach renourishment projects did their jobs.

Eliot S. Schreiber, a former Drexel University professor and now a private consultant who specializes in areas of business risk management and strategy, is a Wilmington native whose family has had a Bethany Beach home since 2003.

“We’ve got a flooding problem already in Bethany that we’ve been trying to solve,” Schreiber says. “We’re either going to have to lower the ocean or raise the town.”

His house is a block and a half from the ocean, and Schreiber worries that his children may live on beachfront.

Schreiber is “absolutely convinced” that humans have triggered coastal and climate threats, and believes America and the world needs to act now to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on carbon-heavy energy sources that triggered the climate change threat.

“It boggles my mind that there are people who don’t see a pattern,” Schreiber says. “We’ve had hotter June, July and August weather. We’re having vicious storms everywhere and people are able to just deny it.”